Many approaches have been taken for constructing bottle racks which are primarily used for storing wine in a recommended inclined position. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,746,178 a modular knock-down wine rack is provided which includes a plurality of end members which are interconnected by bars or interconnecting pieces. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,422,555 a plurality of elongated support members are interconnected by a plurality of struts and in U.S. Pat. No. 4,270,662 identical modular members are provided and used in pairs. In all these configurations a number of interconnecting members or a plurality of parts are required which complicates assembly and disassembly and also makes it difficult to store the variety of parts in a convenient fashion so that when reassembly is required all the parts will be available. In other words, the more or smaller the parts, the more readily they may be misplaced or lost making assembly, disassembly, storage and reassembly a difficult problem. In addition, the requirement of a large number of parts may be more expensive as well as more difficult to configure in the shape desired. Then to, if all of the component parts are not used in a given configuration, they must be stored. None of the configurations illustrated, for example, in the aforesaid patents may be conveniently and compactly stored or stacked in a compact configuration until reused.
A good bottle rack will also be characterized as being sufficiently strong to support a large or varying number of bottles at any given time. Whether one or say twenty (20) bottles are being supported, the bottles should be supported such that they cannot fall through the rack from one position to another, or are not adequately supported regardless of the number of bottles provided. Accordingly, a substantially full cradle or supporting surface is believed essential in order to fairly distribute the weight of the bottle along the entire surface and also to make it easy to both insert and remove a stored bottle from the rack.